1
The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow
Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest
of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the
whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the
beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the
bearings of the island, and that only because there
is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen
in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown
old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging
under our roof.
I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came
plodding to the inn door, his sea-chest following
behind him in a hand-barrow—a tall, strong,
heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over
the shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged
and scarred, with black, broken nails, and the sabre
cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. I
remember him looking round the cover and whistling
to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in
that old sea-song that he sang so often afterwards:
“Fifteen men on the
dead man’s chest—
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”
in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have
been tuned and broken at the capstan bars. Then
he rapped on the door with a bit of stick like a handspike
that he carried, and when my father appeared, called
roughly for a glass of rum. This, when it was
brought to him, he drank slowly, like a connoisseur,
lingering on the taste and still looking about him
at the cliffs and up at our signboard.
“This is a handy cove,” says he at length;
“and a pleasant sittyated grog-shop. Much
company, mate?”
My father told him no, very little company, the more
was the pity.
“Well, then,” said he, “this is
the berth for me. Here you, matey,” he
cried to the man who trundled the barrow; “bring
up alongside and help up my chest. I’ll
stay here a bit,” he continued. “I’m
a plain man; rum and bacon and eggs is what I want,
and that head up there for to watch ships off.
What you mought call me? You mought call me captain.
Oh, I see what you’re at—there”;
and he threw down three or four gold pieces on the
threshold. “You can tell me when I’ve
worked through that,” says he, looking as fierce
as a commander.
And indeed bad as his clothes were and coarsely as
he spoke, he had none of the appearance of a man who
sailed before the mast, but seemed like a mate or
skipper accustomed to be obeyed or to strike.
The man who came with the barrow told us the mail
had set him down the morning before at the Royal George,
that he had inquired what inns there were along the
coast, and hearing ours well spoken of, I suppose,
and described as lonely, had chosen it from the others
for his place of residence. And that was all
we could learn of our guest.
